Four special ways in which the novelist must take thought and thoroughly know
One thinks pretty readily of four special ways in which the novelist must take thought and thoroughly know what he is about; four provisions which he must thoroughly accomplish if his work is completely to justify itself in our eyes. They are, to name them only: (1) Realism of Circumstance; (2) Truth by Representation ; (3) Freshness or Originality ; (4) Fusion of these three and of all the other de¬ments that enter into his subject. It is obvious enough that the sound master of fiction, knowing that he can successfully impart no dream of his through credulity based on self-love, must take infinite precaution that it shall seem true; and that the more romantic it is in essence the more realistic he must make it in detail. There is no bet¬ter exemplification of this truism than that Daniel Defoe—a master, Professor Sir Walter Raleigh calls him, of "grave imperturbable lying"—who wrote a lengthy account of the London plague of 1665 with such vividness that many unlearned readers still ac¬cept it as the account of an eye-witness, though Defoe was but four years old in the Plague Year; who con¬trived a recital of a certain great November storm from hearsay and imagination, recounting casualties by land and sea, and including wholly fictitious letters from eye-witnesses who never existed; who gave many preposterous events in all parts of the world the immediacy and the ring of truth, simply by giving them a latitude and a longitude ; and who, as the sum¬mit of his achievement, took the most utterly romantic figure of all, the lonely hermit of Juan Fernandez, and made him easily the most real of all, by diary, by dialogue, by inventory, by all the little fine arts of persuasion. "There never was such a man or such an island," you say (it makes no difference that, historically speaking, there was) ; "there never was a Crusoe, or a hut with a hedge of stakes round it, or a boat hollowed labouriously out of a tree and then found to be immovably heavy." To which credulity answers : "Ah, but you forget : all these things were, because a man wrote a diary about them! They might, in an ordinary sea-tale, seem rather a large order; but—why, we have the man's own diary !" And there is an image of what the artist's quest for actuality must be, in a certain "scowered" silk dress worn by a lady some twenty-four hours dead, and used by Defoe to help sell a seventh-rate and un¬salable clerical work, Drelincourt's Book of Consola¬tions Against the Fears of Death, with which the Lon¬don book trade appears to have been overstocked in 1705. The estimable Mrs. Bargrave, living at Can¬terbury, receives one morning a call from her old friend and neighbour Mrs. Veal, whom she has not seen for a long time, and who announces now that she has come to say good-bye before taking a journey. The two gossip together in a most natural and familiar vein, about head-aches, and husbands, and friend¬ship, and the degeneracy of the times, and other re¬liable subjects, taking pains to allude several times to the great comfort and inspiration they have re¬ceived from that incomparable work, the Book of Consolations. All is most natural ; the talk proceeds like a stenographic report of things actually said by two such middle-class, prosy, and sentimental per¬sons. "'Do not you think I am mightily impaired by my fits?'" asks Mrs. Veal. "'No,' says Mrs. Bargrave, 'I think you look as well as ever I knew you.'" And again: "Says Mrs. Bargrave : 'It is hard indeed to find a true friend in these days.' Says Mrs. Veal, 'Mr. Norris has a fine copy of verses, called Friendship in Perfection, which I wonderfully admire. Have you seen the book ?"No,' says Mrs. Bargrave, 'but I have the verses of my own writing out.' 'Have you?' says Mrs. Veal, 'then fetch them.' Which she did from above-stairs, and offered them to Mrs. Veal to read, who refused, and waived the thing, saying, holding down her head would make it a,che; and then desiring Mrs. Bargrave to read them to her, which she did. . . . In these verses there is twice used the word 'Elysian."Ah!' says Mrs. Veal, 'these poets have such names for heaven.' " In short, the whole tale is inimitably and incontestably true, up to the point where it transpires that at the time of this conversation Mrs. Veal was also incon¬testably dead. Everything in the story is true except the whole of it. And mark how difficult Defoe makes it to question even that whole. The tale is told by a third woman of exactly-the same stamp as the other two, a life-long friend of Mrs. Bargrave, ready to heap scorn on the husband and neighbours of Mrs. Veal, who deny the story and impeach the character of Mrs. Bargrave. Why, Mrs. Bargrave is "of a cheerful disposition, notwithstanding the ill-usage of a very wicked husband"; of course, then, the story is true. Besides, this third woman's story has been taken down by a lawyer, who believes it himself; clearly, then, it must be true! Moreover, Mrs. Bar- grave had described in considerable detail the "scowered" silk dress which Mrs. Veal actually wore on the day of her death, the day of the alleged visit, though Mrs. Bargrave had never seen that dress or known of its existence: what do you say to that? 0 well, if Mrs. Bargrave really described the dress, that Professor William Lyon Phelps has lately taken the trouble to pronounce a curt little requiescat I over what he considers a corpse past resuscitating. But how can Rasselas be, or become, a dead story when it contains so much wisdom about life, garbed in so beautiful a vesture of imagery and symbolism? And how can it be called a pessimistic story, when it contains, not a philosophical interpretation of a fact, but the bare and simple fact alone "The Vanity of Human Wishes"—that is the theme of Rasselas, the large general fact about life which it represents. Well, human wishes are vain, aren't they? which is all that Dr. Johnson says. He bases his tale on the fact, hardly open to dispute, that whatever we get out of life we do not get what we are looking for. He does not say that we ought to get what we are looking for; he does not say, as a pessimist would, that our failure to get it proves the evil organization of the world. Johnson draws his indictment, not against the sorry scheme of things which cheats hu¬man nature out of its fond hopes, but against the sorry scheme of human nature itself, which hopes unreasonably, vaunts itself, overestimates its own de¬serts, and claims more than it is in the nature of things to grant. Rasselas is a plea for classical or stoic discipline of the will. At the best, it says, "Man has but little here below, Nor has that little long": then it is the part of wisdom for him to curb his ex- pectations, make the most of his little, and turn from following illusive phantoms of happiness and free¬dom which the collective wisdom of mankind has never been able to capture. Rasselas and his sister leave their Happy Valley to fare through the world in search of contentment. They find many strange things, and some sad ones; they find wisdom and folly, work and idleness, pleasure of the voluptuary and asceticism of the hermit, all strivings and all miseries—but not contentment. In the end they go back to the Happy Valley, dedicating themselves to the idea of service to their own people, a beneficent rule. Johnson never says that idleness is better than work, that folly is as good as wisdom : he sayS only that life is for every one of us something other than we expect it to be, and that we have not learned the secret of what life is until we stop abusing it for not living up to our misconception of it. This is not pessimistic doctrine : it is wise counsel, based on one of the eternal verities, deriving its sweetness from a pervasive mild melancholy far removed from cyni¬cism, and its strength from the universal applicabil¬ity of its one central truth about life. This kind of appeal through a large general truth, of which Rasselas is one of the purest examples, makes the least possible demand on our third care, for Originality. One can indeed distort, but one can ) hardly invent, the eternal verities; and for this rea- on the one element of the novel that would best not undertake to be new is its philosophy. But there is another, and probably more important, kind of Truth by Representation, which does interlock with the necessity of being original. The novelist makes use, whether he mean to or not, of general truths about the world and about man's life therein ; but this fact is not so arresting as his citizenship in the largest, most universal state that has ever existed, the state of our common Human Nature. The novel¬ist must provide something new in human character and personality, at the same time that he observes the universally experienced laws of animal behaviour, the common stock of motive and impulse, passion and sentiment. He must be master of similarity in dif¬ference ; he must acquaint us with new beings, the elements so mixed in them that we feel them as definite additions to our world, and yet he must weave them out of the old, old substances, the desires we have all known, the contradictions and incongruities that are parts of all of us—the human nature that we all partake of. The folk we meet in his pages must be themselves, yet like ourselves; their hearts must beat in echo to the common heart of mankind, yet somehow in a different, an individual and per¬sonal rhythm. This achievement alone can be called "creative" in the most elemental sense known to literary art. The creation of a new character is akin to the stroke of cosmic creation which brings something out of nothing, substance out of the void and the breath of life out of the inert substance. If we consider the pre-eminence in our English imaginative literature of three names, Chaucer, Shakspere, Dickens, we shall find its secret in the host of complete, rounded, and original pieces of human nature which throng to our memory at the mention of those names. Their human creations represent the world, our world of action and emotion, all complete; and they represent themselves too, they are creatures that were never in the world before. For this elemental creative power there is no rival ?and no substitute. Ingenuity and experience can ac¬count for originality of setting, the preparation of new hues and blends of local colour; ingenuity and labour can devise plots whose sequences shall seem new. But only the most impersonal and selfless genius can create a Pardoner, a Falstaff, a Mr. Sapsea, or—to add one other novelist who lives principally in his fewer created personalities—an Uncle Toby. / Having this power, a great novelist can almost afford to lack everything else. It has been said of Dickens that his characters were good "so long as he could keep them out of his stories." His minor characters are more alive than the major characters of most writers ; and we care little whether they carry on the story or not, so long as they consent to live on before us in that "perpetual summer of being themselves." Some critics have said that Laurence Sterne 'a prin¬cipal stock-in-trade was his whimsical nicety in sala¬cious innuendo. Not so : for his name would long since have been forgotten had he not affixed it to Uncle Toby, the real immortal. Shall we let Fielding speak for us once more, on this subject of Human Nature? "The provision, then, which we have here e., in Tom Jones made is no other than Human Nature. Nor do I fear that my sensible reader, though most luxurious in his taste, will start, cavil, or be offended, because I have named but one article. The tortoise— as the alderman of Bristol, well learned in eating, knows by much experience—besides the delicious cali¬pash and calipee, contains many different kinds of food; nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one gen¬eral name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will have sooner gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an au¬thor will be able to exhaust so extensive a subject. "An objection may perhaps be apprehended from the more delicate, that this dish is too common and vulgar; for what else is the subject of all the ro¬mances, novels, plays, and poems, with which the stalls abound? Many exquisite viands might be re¬jected by the epicure, if it was a sufficient cause for his contemning of them as common and vulgar, that something was to be found in the most paltry alleys under the same name. In reality, true nature is as difficult to be met with in authors, as the Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops." And now, the fourth and final matter, Artistic Fusion. but at least I may throw out here, as obvious and self-explanatory, the sugges¬tion that) a skilfully written novel, however complexV and various its elements, must be in some sense single, of a piece ;( that the various elements must be woven, somehow into a texture:1 Character, action, and scene must be parts of each other ; at the least they must hold an interdependent relation, strike their several notes in a larger harmony. When I said a moment ago that we could 'almost concede Dickens his place on the strength and living originality of his charac¬ters alone, I was trusting a good deal to the "almost." The art of fiction, when really a fine art, cannot divorce character from action, any more than Thwackum and Square could divorce real ideas from conduct. And if, in addition to its scene and action and char¬acter, the novel contain general truisms about life, those too must come legitimately—that is, logically and inevitably—out of the action, at once governing and explaining it ; they must not be simply the gratu¬itous plastered-on opinions of the author. His af¬fair is to create his puppets and then let them seem to manage their own destinies: let him not jerk them this way and that on wires palpably of his own con¬triving. Of course really strong and persuasive action is that which seems to come out of the characters' own wills, or out of their own weaknesses. An action which we all recognize as the only one open to the given person in the given situation has artistic inevitability. An act which divides our opinions and starts argu¬ments among critics may be dubiously contrived, an artistic shortcoming; or the character may be exceedingly complex or vacillating, so that inevitability is less determinate. An act which stamps its own pre¬posterousness on our minds means that the artist has suffered a lapse of co-operation between his persons and his plot. These considerations are self-evident : one can do no more, and no less, than state them. But the obviousness of the principle does not lessen the difficulty of the practice; and the perfect fusion, on a grand scale, of action and character is an ob¬jective attained by only a few supreme books in Eng¬lish, and by only a handful of authors in the whole history of fiction.